Salgateria

Salgateria, the new -soon-to-be- Brazilian Street Food restaurants in Sweden.

This was actually a project I made together with Magnus Spång and Kristoffer Lundberg at Kalmar University during my Web-programming studies. Our little group get to work with Ana Emilia & Stefhan Klasson, two wonderful people, at Bazaarfood AB and their new venture Salgateria.

Unfortunately I can’t tell that much about Salgateria, yet, because they are set to launch in Q1 2010. But is a restaurant of sorts where they will serve among other things the food they make at the Bazaarfood company, which is Brazilian tapas.

We had pretty free hands when it come to selection of CMS-system, layout and design. They had the logo ready, and colors for the business and our job was to use these to design a website for upcoming restaurant(s). The site it self would function like the window to the public, you should be able to see what is offered at the restaurants, find where they are located, news, happenings and pictures to get people to come and and visit the Salgateria.

Ana and Stefhan wanted the site to be easily scalable in the future, as there wouldn’t be that many Salgaterias at the beginning, but they could grow very fast. With that in mind we choice to use a bit larger and heavier CMS in favor of something lighter and easier like WordPress. We considered Joomla and Drupal, but went the Joomla way, mostly because of the limited time we had to complete the project (as it was a “school-project” we had only about a months time). We felt that learning Joomla would go faster than taming the Drupal beast [that is NOT a stab at Drupal in anyway].

The biggest work was probably setting up the structure of the site. It wasn’t just, creating a page where someone could fill in or add a new restaurant or food item, we ended up with long menu/page structure list. There was the scalability issue to think about, as well as the possible users. A restaurant owner with limited computer experience should be able to administer pages for his restaurant without any hassle.

Ana and Stefhan were very happy with the end result, both design wise, the functionality and ease of use.

We handed the site over to the Klassons in April 2009 and it will go live sometime in February-March 2010 if all goes as planned.

The site has gone live since 18th of April 2010 and you can view at Salgaterias own little place on the Internet!

You can browse a preview of the site here.(it is not the finished site but one of the last iterations we made)

Ideas and thoughts?